SAJU: She-cession, America's first female recession
Column: Pride, Not Prejudice
Women helped to drag the American economy out of the last recession in 2008, but the recent economic recession, which resulted from the pandemic, is disproportionately impacting women.
While women make up 47 percent of America’s labor force, they represented more than half of the pandemic’s initial job losses, and women of color were especially affected.
Typically, during recessions, the industries which are hit the hardest are often male dominated (construction, manufacturing and utilities). The effect of the pandemic, though, has jeopardized industries like childcare, personal beauty services, retail and the food industry that are more female dominated.
The lack of available childcare has also contributed to this “she-cession.” Women who work in industries that survived the initial effects of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had to determine a course of action for their families when childcare stopped being an option in many states.
The burden of childcare, whether it involves working less hours or leaving a job to commit to home schooling full time, often falls to women. Many single mothers who have frontline jobs are facing the emergency of 24-hour child care.
For the first time since the steady upward progress women have made in the 1970s, the participation gap between men and women between the ages of 25 and 54 is now widening after shrinking to the narrowest ever right before the virus. This year, female unemployment reached double digits for the first time since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking women’s unemployment.
Women’s participation and gains in the marketplace helped to create an economy $2 trillion larger than it would have been if women’s participation levels stagnated in 1970, all the while women were earning less than their male counterparts. Relative to white non-Hispanic men, white women are paid 81 cents on the dollar, Black women are paid only 65 cents on the dollar and Hispanic women are paid only 58 cents on the dollar.
As women are forced to take a break from their careers, many unplanned, they are missing valuable work experiences and mentoring opportunities in the workforce. When — or if — they return, they will not be able to be promoted at the same rate as their male colleagues who got to stay at work the whole time.
The scars left on the workforce from the female recession affect not only families and individual workers — companies are suffering from a loss of talent, diversity and input.
“I kept wondering, ‘How long will the personal choices I made around COVID-19 hurt me permanently?’” said Ellu Nasser, a mother of two who sacrificed both her potential dream job and her part-time job to be at home with her sons. Against her career ambitions, Nasser became a stay-at-home mom for the first time in her life, collateral damage in America’s first female recession.
A third of the female workforce became essential workers this past year: “From the cashier to the emergency room nurse to the drugstore pharmacist to the home health aide taking the bus to check on her older client, the soldier on the front lines of the current national emergency is most likely a woman,” according to The New York Times.
These women are underpaid and undervalued, and they have been for a long time. They are the unseen labor force that kept the country running long before the coronavirus changed the world.
Andrea Lindley, an intensive care unit nurse at a Philadelphia hospital, admits she “didn’t sign up for a pandemic, … (but she is) not going to walk away when people need me.” With her husband unable to find work and their daughter recovering from leukemia, she has nightmares about going to work. Even though women like her are essential, they are not paid well enough and they are not appreciated enough for the work they do.
Women are taking an undue burden of all the invisible labor, and a lack of national attention toward the issues that impact them is the result of keeping women from positions of power where they could have turned their lived experiences into policy.
In a society constantly clamoring to ask women if they can “have it all,” we must stop to ask what are the barriers that keep women from having it all in the first place.
Neha Saju is a School of Arts and Sciences junior majoring in political science and history and minoring in English. Her column, "Pride, Not Prejudice," runs on alternate Mondays.
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